Dear Readers,

In our first issue we usually take the opportunity to look back and we summarize developments and experiences oft last year. 2020 surprised us with unexpected challenges and changes first and foremost caused by the global pandemic. Worldwide travel restrictions and lockdowns necessitated substantial realignments of the way we work and communicate. This did not only affect our editorial team but even more so the researchers and authors who publish in steel research international. Despite all technical and practical obstacles, we are very proud that this journal was able to prosper even further. We are now sharing the most important trends in steel research with you for the 95th year and in the face of the pandemic the last year was very successful.

Our submission numbers as well as the number of published manuscripts continue to increase. We are also observing a continuous growth of open access publications. While in 2018 about 2% of the articles were published open access in steel research international and 8% in 2019, more than 25% of our authors chose open access in 2020. We are delighted by the fact that these developments are accompanied by a continuously rising impact factor. Accordingly, the journal received the highest‐ever impact factor in 2020 (see Figure 1).

We intent to be a global and highly international platform and so we would like to highlight the fact that we received submissions from 42 different countries in 2020. For comparison there were only 33 contributing countries in 2019. While most accepted articles have their source in China we see a higher percentage and more equal distribution in other countries now. Figure 2 illustrates the acceptance numbers from the most contributing countries.

Last year, we published several very interesting special issues starting with “Tooling 2019”, guest‐edited by Christoph Broeckmann, and recently “Highlights from ESTAD 2019”, guest‐edited by Wolfgang Bleck and Hans Bodo Lüngen, as well as “K1‐MET—Competence in advanced metallurgical and environmental process development” by Johannes Schenk and Thomas Bürgler. These special issues were certainly one but not the only reason that the overall number of downloads and read accesses also further increased. Table 1 shows the most accessed articles in 2020. The high access‐rate is a strong indicator that these manuscripts will certainly have a substantial scientific impact in the future. At the same time, the overall article downloads increased by about 20% in steel research international last year. This further emphasizes the continuing interest of the scientific community.

Moreover, last year has seen further exciting developments for our journal. Several very renowned leaders in steel research joined our International Advisory Board. We are looking forward to future collaboration and we are convinced that they will further raise the standards and quality in this journal. We welcome our eleven new International Advisory Board members:

Towards the end of last year, we simplified the submission and transfer process for authors. steel research international and its sister journals now have a single concise set of article types. The most notable change is the discontinuation of the article types “Communication” and “Full Paper,” which are replaced by “Research Article” and can contain original research studies of any length. More information on the article types can be found in our author guidelines.

We believe this is a significant step towards making life easier for our authors, readers and reviewers as it greatly reduces the need for formatting in general and reformatting after transfer to a sister journal.

The ongoing success story of the journal would not be possible without support from its community. We would like to thank all board members, reviewers, readers, and authors for their ongoing support and interest in steel research international.

Looking forward to a new and successful year 2021 that will hopefully not be clouded by the global pandemic.